No one knows what receiving a shoebox from Operation Christmas Child can mean in a young person’s life better than Jerry Amal Prasad.
Amal Prasad was about 11-years-old when Samaritan’s Purse, a non-denominational evangelical Christian organization, visited Ernakulam, India to deliver hundreds of the shoeboxes filled with toys, school and hygiene supplies, to children there.
Ernakulam, is a district of Kerala and it has a population of more than three million.
“I’m a pastor’s kid and our church helped distribute the boxes to the children,” he said, adding that is including the children that came into the city from the outlying villages.
Amal Prasad, now 22, has been living in Barrhead for the last six months working at Fas Gas in an effort to gain his permanent Canadian resident status. He came to Canada about two-and-half years ago on a student visa to go to the Blue Bird Flight Academy in Chilliwack, B.C. in an effort to get his commercial pilot’s licence. Eventually he hopes to become an airline captain and be able to sponsor his family so they can come to Canada.
Amal Prasad said the children who travelled to Ernakulam from the villages were very poor and as a result they often couldn’t afford the necessary supplies to go to school.
“The shoeboxes were of great help,” he said, during Operation Christmas Child’s official Sept. 24 launch at the Barrhead Alliance Church, adding after the boxes were distributed, children gathered together to open their packages trading items amongst each other to make the most of what they were given.
Herb Mantey, co-organizer of Barrhead’s Operation Christmas Child effort said this is a story he has heard from other shoebox recipients.
“A shoebox’s impact go es far beyond the person who receives it,” he said. “If each person, who gets a box, touches a person, who then touches another person, then in the span over 10 years [the number of years Barrhead has been involved in the program] that one box has touched 512 people.”
Amal Prasad agreed, saying his box included a number of items that he was able to share with other children, which enabled them to be able to go to school.
However, Amal Prasad said while the items in a shoebox make a large difference in a child’s life, the message it gives is just as important.
It is easy, he said, for impoverished families to get to the point where they give up hope.
“Children are surprised, not only because they are seeing things they have never seen before, but to know there are people from all over the world that are thinking of them. It’s really a nice feeling,” he said, noting he still treasures letters written to him by the sender of his shoebox.
Amal Prasad hopes to be able to pass on that same feeling to another child, when he packs his own Operation Christmas Child shoebox.
